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Publish or Perish !

After after harnessing the laws of Nature, and applying Truth and Reason to triumph over dogmatic Religion, Science now seems to be capable of falling into the same traps of power and corruption that can undermine all great human pursuits and lofty achievements. Hopefully, the same basic principals that allowed Science to persevere and flourish, can also be brought to bear upon its own methods now, in order to redeem itself to the Media and clamoring Masses that have lost their blind faith.

Since we’ve all been raised to believe that Science is based in Truth, and that Justice and Liberty are inalienable rights, it should come as no surprise that the General Public risks becoming(at least temporarily) disenfranchised by the fact that there seems to be some degree of suppressed dissent in the Scientific Community revolving around Climate Science. From a Layman’s point of view, many people have grown weary of the arguments, and are ready to just “follow the money” when it comes to understanding the causes of the global warming debate. Most intelligent people are also becoming hyper-sensitized to anything that even remotely resembles propaganda, and have started to see past the all political posturing, economic interests, and ethical self-righteousness of the Climate Change movement to realize that we might actually have a more profound and underlying dilemma to consider here. One that is failing to address deeper ecological issues, while still trying to commoditize carbon dioxide through legislation. A dilemma which might eventually stem itself from our Society’s reliance on Science as the primary guiding force in human achievement and evolution. Therefore, in order to proceed into a clarified vision of the Future where environmental issues can be addressed at their root cause, let’s first consider the risks of losing our best guiding force in a world presently ruled by money and politics.

As we risk losing our faith in Science here in the Present, we need to regain a workable trust in what we had hoped were the infallible principals of the Scientific Method in order to move towards a more pre-verified Future outlook. Since many people believe that Science has indeed supplanted Religion (which arguably supplanted Nature long ago!) as our guiding force in Society and Life as we know it, let’s proceed according to any other scientific or “religious” study by considering the facts as basic articles of faith, and as they exist within the scientific community itself. The first step to redeeming our views of Science would surely be to turn to the ‘scripture’ of Science, as it has been methodically collected and presented throughout the ages by the indentured librarians and peer-reviewed science journals that this community of researchers and trusted professionals places its own trust into.

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If you’d like a clear view of what creates Jet Contrails just:

If you don’t think that jet travel could be playing a major role in either climate change, or modified atmospheric chemistry, then you probably don’t need to dive into this deeper exploration. If however you see Climate Change as an enormous combination of factors, you might find some points of interests below. There is far more at play here than even the most outrageous “Chemetrail Conspiracy” has ever even touched upon.

In our explorations of jet exhaust and ‘vapour contrails‘ and the impact of air travel on our Future Environment, we’ve made previous attempts to speculate upon why certain channels in the Mainstream Media have taken interest in a rather weak Conspiracy Theory like “Chemtrails”, rather than digging into the underlying science of Contrails (and environmental impact of jet exhaust) for a bonefide piece of investigative journalism on a possibly much deeper conspiracy.

If there’s such a thing as covering up an actual conspiracy with weaker, more easily discredited, conspiracy theories, then it’s quite possible that the airline industry knows full well that its altering the stratosphere, and affecting the environment. That the prevalence of “Chemtrail” theories might simply be serving to throw people off the trail by simply associating any negative environmental news about airliners with more easily dismissed “conspiracy theories”. It certainly not as simple as a supposedly well-intentioned geo-engineering initiative.

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– SOCIAL REPORT –

Political strategy is a moving target in any debate, but can we at least be sure that our Leaders have selected the right objectives in their bid to win the battle against Global Warming?

In the ongoing heavy-weight bout against Global Warming, the tag-team proposals for pricing CO2 emissions (primarily either via Taxes or Carbon Cap and Trade) both took serious blows to the head at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and were allowed to drop to the mat. Rather than standing back up in desperation, and vowing to take the fight into the streets, the proponents of these (so-called) “solutions” seemed content to just hang onto the ropes and wait for the bell to end the Copenhagen round. This event has now fallen apart with little to show for it than promises that things will be settled at the next U.N. Climate Change Conference, that nobody can even be bothered to set their forward sites upon at this point. Hell…Even the Copenhagen Conference website was dismantled less than a month after things wrapped up in Denmark, with little of value being forwarded from the defunct address. Luckily there are still lots of excellent resources out there to explain the functions and perceived benefits of such complex concepts as Carbon Cap and Trade, for example…

One can’t help feel as though the Post-Copenhagen letdown has left us to either take this fight to a more personal level as the Media moves on to it’s next ‘cause celebre’, or otherwise just allow Human Nature to overtake us, and simply focus on our more immediate needs as we sub-consciously recoil from the unknowns of an uncertain Future.

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– EVENT REPORT –

Worldwide adoption of Carbon Capture and Storage solutions have been delayed by an announcement at the Copenhagen Conference

The link to this News Event is no longer available at COP15.dk but it has been cached at Google!

The primary thrust of the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change was to implement an accord of limiting CO2 emissions worldwide, and thus necessitate various regulatory solutions which would have required industry to either reduce their emissions, or face stiff financial consequences. This is where Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) would have liked to step in with some immediate industrial-grade solutions, presumably while the rest of us continued to consider the enormous challenges of actually reducing and eliminating our reliance on carbon emitting fossil fuels as a Society. As mentioned previously however (COP15.dk is History), the committee under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had discussed the issue of CCS during the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, but delayed any decisions on the subject until future summits. The committee contended that some countries had concerns over the long-term viability for the storage site, including liability for any seepage. Thus the larger challenges of capturing CO2 have seemingly become stuck behind a roadblocking question of legal liability in the ‘storage’ component of this much larger process.

Deja Vu

Proponents of Nuclear Energy will no doubt see a parallel in the bitter irony of yet another Green industry being hindered by the wasted energy and by-products of bureaucratic finagling and legal wrangling over questions of waste storage…Rather than getting on with the business of refining the existing (and already adequate) processes, while continuing to develop new and improved waste management solutions, and effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions IMMEDIATELY, rather delaying movement until later, once the technical details and legal liabilities of any unforeseen accidents have been ironed out to the Nth degree. Carbon Capture Left Out in the Cold

What did Copenhagen teach us about CCS

In it’s search for an accord, Copenhagen seemed like a direct precursor to establishing and implementing Carbon Cap/Trade/Tax solutions, that would place financial burdens on all CO2 emitters, and incent the development and application of CO2 capture technologies to reduce such burden. Although the COP15.dk site is now dead in the water, there are still “selected” pages made available by the Danish Government, which may cast light on what the Conference organizers wished to present as their lasting legacy from this historic conference, or at least demonstrate where the organizers left things on the rather important subject of CCS. A search for “Carbon Capture” yields only four (yes, 4!) results on this rather critical next step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click Here, if you’d like to consider what these meagre results say about the Future of CCS from the POV of those who selectively transplanted the entire the COP15.dk site less that a month after the Copenhagen Conference closed.

CCS…Does green Energy hurt the Carbon Market?

In a short blogpost at Envirogy (derived almost entirely from Spiegel Online), we can clearly see how Green (or low emisions Renewable) Energy sources have actually hurt the price of carbon at the European Climate Exchange (and thus the cost incentives for implementing CCS), and in fact the entire system can be proven to have not reduced European carbon emmisions by a single gram!

Sitting on the Border Fences

Meanwhile, in North America, the open markets for carbon at the Chicago Climate Exchange is still awaiting the kinds of regulatory and political pressures that will kick things into a higher gear, and properly comodify Carbon in the U.S. and thus at least make select financiers, investors, and other assorted Middlemen rich in the process, if not at least repeating the lessons already being learned in Europe.

Meanwhile in the Oilpatch

Even though Copenhagen squashed any immediate hopes for Carbon Cap/Trade pricing, and delayed it’s pronouncements on teh future of CCS, searching the transplanted COP15.dk site yields a link to shipping giant Maersk’s role in bringing CO2 to oilfields in the North Atlantic, and there are examples all over the world where CO2 is pumped down into older oilwells to force out remaining oil, and maximize yield. In fact contrary to popular belief, CO2 has already been getting stored in large quantities within used up gasfields, with the only concerns so far being in small amounts of CO2 re-escaping via carbonated water in the formations, and the possible formation of carbonic acid within any porous water areas. The fixation in carbonate minerals is playing only a minor role, so the search to chemically ‘fix’ CO2 into a more neutral and stable state will continue.

MEDIA & IMPACT REPORT:

The official website for the Copenhagen Climate Conference has been taken down, and traffic is being redirected to :

Near the end of the proceedings at last months U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, news was posted to the official Conference website (COP15.dk) that capturing Carbon Dioxide (CO2) at the source (of industrial emissions) and storing it underground is not likely to become a measure supported by the UN-backed Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) this year. A committee under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has discussed the issue, but delayed any decisions until future summits.

Please don’t bother clicking on the above-mentioned COP15.dk link though, because less than a month after the conclusion of the conference, this newslink is now unavailable, along with all the rest of the COP15.dk website! Instead, all traffic is being directed to “The Official Website of Denmark”.

What we’re left with, as a reference on this historic event less than a month later, is a mere footnote that states: “this page contains a selection of some of the most popular content from Denmark’s Host Country website for UN Climate Change Conference 2009 – cop15.dk ”

What possible reasons could there be for taking down this official site so quickly? What benefits could possibly be derived from removing this enormous resource? Most importantly, what are the perceived repercussions of such an obviously hasty demise of what should have our greatest reference point on Climate Change at the end of 2009, if not an actual public launchpoint as we move forward through the Post-Copenhagen letdown, and proceed with all the work adn understanding that still needs to be accomplished?

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Suspected anomalies discovered in article published at MIT News :

The ongoing, yet destructively repressed and polarized, debates between so called Climate Skeptics (and their ilk) VS. the popular proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) may have cooled slightly in the post-Copenhagen lull. But questions around the scope of Scientific Method employed in determining AGW, are only now beginning to rise to the forefront of Public Consciousness.

The primary question has been to wonder if it’s indeed possible for ‘pure science’ (at least at the educational research level) to be bent or distorted in order to serve pre-ordained objectives.

So can science be bent around the points of peerage that are always subject to new review (according to said Method), to instead selectively support current states of research. In effect whatever specific agendas, that might tap into otherwise unavailable funding, or even simply to act as a public relations tool – in service of much larger visibility campaigns?

If we can possibly leave aside (just for now) the temporarily cooled question of Climate Change, we could look for signs of all of the above in a surprisingly exuberant article published on the MIT News site in July 2008 instead of wondering if science is above promoting itself for the sake of funding or notoriety.

Even though it’s exultant title wildly proclaims that a “Major Discovery from MIT is primed to unleash a Solar Revolution”! the hard science and empirical data or comparative results behind the article are thinly presented (at least from the Layman’s POV), and there still doesn’t seem to be much obvious evidence of wider public discourse or a proper ‘peer review’ process around this “major discovery” either.

Perhaps this is just the style employed for wider press releases via “MIT News”, however one would at least expect to see evidence of published papers/results, or at least links to some shared or foundation research. Perhaps MIT is operating under the principals of private enterprise, and it wouldn’t want to jeopardize plans to commercialize it’s discovery by giving away any un-patented trade secrets.

That last possibility would indicate that we’ve already seriously diverged out of the field of publicly funded research, and into corporately (privately?) held intellectual property. Perhaps someone could clarify the business model that supports MIT, or other such institutions to dispel any such naivete that could be evidenced here.

In any case, let’s try to leave commercial interests aside, and get back to some hard Science.